The internet is big, runs through undersea cables, powered with the many servers and data centers located around the world.
These locations hum as their cooling systems run to cool the processors that power the giant computers.
In order to create what it's called the "metaverse" and make it a major communication platform on the scale of the World Wide Web, Intel suggests that humanity is still having a long way to go.
This is because according to the chipmaker, merging the real world and the digital world by creating a world in virtual reality requires at least 1000x increase in computation efficiency.
In a newsroom post, Raja Koduri, a senior VP at Intel, wrote:
And not only from the hardware side that needs improvements.
According to Koduri, the metaverse would also require new software architectures and algorithms. That, in order to make the metaverse a reality and useful.
It should be noted that the term "metaverse" is yet to be understood properly beyond some visionaries' and researchers' imagination.
What this means, at this time, there is no threshold for how much computing power the metaverse will require.
While the term "metaverse" was coined by Neal Stephenson through his novel Snow Crash, with Philip Rosedale among the pioneers who commercialized the virtual world, some people suggested that the metaverse also exists despite in a rudimentary form.
But Koduri’s statement is trying to explain that powering the metaverse is not an easy task.
In order for internet users to enter the metaverse through their VR/AR devices, the whole internet needs to be upgraded because things will consume way more power.
Koduri envisions that the metaverse should be more than just people using their headgears and peripherals, walking around in the virtual worlds using their basic avatars to communicate and socialize.
The metaverse should include "convincing and detailed avatars with realistic clothing, hair and skin tones – all rendered in real-time and based on sensor data capturing real-world 3D objects, gestures, audio and much more; data transfer at super-high bandwidths and extremely low latencies; and a persistent model of the environment, which may contain both real and simulated elements."
Doing all the processing using a state-of-the-art PC with high-end hardware is possible if done locally, for one person.
But for all people of the internet to be able to connect to experience things that are beyond ordinary avatars, is something that has never been thought of.
And if the requirement is more power, then there needs to be improvement in processing efficiency as well.
Moreover, Koduri doesn’t even think hardware alone will be able to reach that 1000x number any time soon.
Instead, Koduri suggested that AI and software improvements should fill the gap.
Ever since Mark Zuckerberg rebrands Facebook to Meta to then launched Horizon Worlds as the company's first attempt in creating the metaverse, almost everyone in the tech industry is talking about it.
Following this, major companies started working to develop their own vision of this metaverse.